[MG] Pollserver Federation - Crosstalk between voting systems

[Alex Rollin]

On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 12:42 PM, Thomas von der Elbe
<ThomasvonderElbe at gmx.de> wrote:

> I also agree with the idea of the standard. It would basically simply
> describe, how an external tool can be plugged into the theatre, what data it
> can receive and what data it can send in what format, right?

I feel that the theatre is a potentially "unifying effort" that can
help all the projects to succeed in the long run.  In the short run,
though, the theatre serves as rationale for discovering and
collaborating on standards that allow the different systems to
interact.  The attraction of the theatre may be enough to get us
together to work on some standards which would allow systems to
interact in a number of different ways.  It's an opportunity for us to
all work together on an open architecture that could serve all the
projects and that would certainly benefit from many great minds
looking at it and figuring out how to make it work.

The process of creating a standard can give us some new insight into
what is next for Votorola, too, and perhaps help us to understand the
reality of making Votorola work with online organizing and voting in
ways that step away from the street wiki approach for authentication,
opening the door to a lot of potential.

> First we can invite all interested voting-projects to express their wishes
> for the standard. Quite a few are on this list already. So please feel
> invited!
>
> Second, since Votorola is already being plugged in, we can try to foresee
> others wishes, i.e. make the interface as universal as possible. Plus
> express ourselves, what data Votorola would like to exchange with the
> theatre. You started with this already:
>
> Data coming from the following activities:
>
> 1. Create a unique poll
> 2. Create a position within that poll
> 3. Allow users to vote for a position
> 4. Allow another user to propose a competing position
> 5. Allow a user to produce a "Comparison/Diff" between 2 position
>
> 7. Allow user to authenticate
>
> Plus:
>
> 8. Delegate my and my received votes in poll X to person P
>
I feel that it's important that folks step in from other projects and
discuss the next steps.  It's not clear to me yet how "options" like
delegable proxy are seen by other projects, and I am sure that goes
for other pieces of the 8 items listed above.

I do think that starting with something simple, like "Unique URI for
Poll" is a good place to start.  Every poll should have that, no?

Perhaps we can choose one of our voting systems to go through and add
in these bits of data and poll on each of them to find consistancy
between the projects.  I do not think that the projects are so similar
that the only difference is the UI; far from the case I think each
project brings an "expert emphasis" to some specific area and that all
the projects can benefit from understanding this area even though they
may not implement it.

Again, though, to start with the basics for "open" and "consensus
building" and to hammer out a few basic use cases for the standard
would be very helpful.

Here's an example for the Federated Social Web project:
http://federatedsocialweb.net/wiki/SWAT0

Working together on a use case that involves multiple polling
facilitaties and that checks authentication protocols, as well as
invoking the cross-forum theatre functionality would give us something
to sink our teeth into.

Alex Rollin
http://alexrollin.com



Originally posted to the mailing list of the Metagovernment Project:
http://metagovernment.org/mailman/listinfo/start_metagovernment.org